According to his online biography, Moroccan-born artist Gérard Gachet is a lifelong insomniac. Instead of sleeping at night, Gachet would fill the dark hours by doing prep work for illustrations, conceptualizing ideas when his sense of perception was at its height. He would then head out to fish as dawn approached, before returning to his studio to work. According to Gachet, each of his intricate drawings can take approximately a month to complete.

Gachet’s love of nature, especially entomology is abundantly clear in his black and white illustrations which he creates using various mediums such as ballpoint pen, pencils and airbrushing. Gachet’s art can easily be classified as surrealism, though he considers himself more aligned within the realm of fantastic realism. He has also cited both Rembrandt and Goya as two of his favorite artists.

In 1970, some of Gachet’s work was displayed in a gallery in Paris. In an interview Gachet gave to French magazine ZOOM that same year, he spoke about an incident at the gallery during which some of his explicit drawings were destroyed by a vandal armed with a screwdriver. The art-hater was never caught, and amazingly the director of the gallery filed a complaint against the artist himself claiming that it was his artwork that drove the derelict to destroy his work as well as other paintings in the gallery.

In 1988 Gachet published the book Desseins containing images of his lurid, dreamlike drawings which if you can track down, is well worth owning. Sadly, I know little else about this incredibly talented artist and his engrossing erotica. However, if you are fluent in French, you could read the long, detailed interview I mentioned above from ZOOM, here to learn a bit more about him by properly translating it yourself. The images that follow are NSFW.